A Weekend in Paradise: Wallowing in Woodstock the Spectacle

In my job, the idea is to have fun. If you don't have fun most of the
time, you're not doing your job. And if you do, you're permitted to
conclude that when you don't, they're not doing their job. So one
reason I attended Woodstock II was to have fun. But I never thought it
would be easy.

For one thing, I had trouble finding a date, and understandably so:
preliminary reports read like Monty Python fantasies. The rigidly
scheduled arrivals at inaccessible parking lots in groups of not more
or less than four, the severely limited egress, the bans on not just
drugs and alcohol but children and coolers and, Jesus, tent stakes,
and--the crowning touch--the scrip that would be the only legal tender
at the overpriced concession stands made Woodstock-in-Saugerties sound
like a cross between Tommy's Holiday Camp and the company store
Tennessee Ernie sold his soul to. My lifetime companion preferred to
stay in bed.

Still, I found much of the nay-saying misguided. Doing talking head
duty as one of the few veterans of Woodstock '69 with a public claim
to enthusiasm for Rock and Roll '94, I was dismayed when an
interviewer complained that the new model was "commercial." I mean,
this was rock and roll. The main reason the first festival didn't make
money, if it didn't after residuals, was that the exploitation of
popular music was so primitive back then. Even sillier were the whines
of Catskill locals that Michael Lang and his PolyGram collaborators
had purloined a sacred spirit from either a bunch of washed-up folkies
at the old Max Yasgur place or the town of Woodstock. By refusing to
countenance a real rock concert in a neck of the woods where the
old-timers I've talked to look back on the first festival with
nostalgic pride, the Sullivan County powers-that-be got the traffic
jam and terrible music they deserved (although the Deadhead-style Free
Festival that replaced Sid Bernstein's fiasco clearly did have a
utopian-escapist magic of its own). As for the boho yokels sequestered
in Woodstock-the-municipality, let me be perfectly clear. One factor
above all made both Woodstock I and Woodstock II whatever they were:
size. They were big, b-i-g big. BIG. BIG. BI-fucking-IG. And they
wouldn't have been that way without money, m-o-n-e-y
money. Shekels. Dollars. Venture capital.

None of which is to suggest that the basic pretension of Woodstock II,
which is that somehow a myth would return to life with the proper
application of money, wasn't totally and permanently ridiculous. "They
say history repeats itself," we in the press tent heard again and
again from PolyGram's John Scher, who emerged as corporate
spokesperson once the event was underway and Lang's patina of
authenticity had outlived its usefulness. Yet though the conceit goes
back to Thucydides, as a '60s fart I prefer Marx, who amended Hegel
with "the first time as tragedy, the second as farce"--only since the
original Woodstock was more like a miracle, call the follow-up a
spectacle. As I told one interviewer, it's impossible to recreate your
own marriage five years down the road, so how could anyone expect to
recreate so much vaster a social fact? But as I also told her, that
didn't mean something else fairly wondrous couldn't happen instead.

That wasn't the main reason I ended up at Woodstock II, however. The
main reason was that I wanted to see the bands. Maybe somewhere in the
world there's an equally vast social fact, perhaps a religious
pilgrimage I'm too culture-bound to know about. But this one wouldn't
have happened--wouldn't have happened once, wouldn't have happened
twice--without rock and roll. The music wasn't what the
original seekers remembered about Woodstock I, but it was why
they were there, and as the crowds jamming the North Field at
Saugerties Saturday and Sunday proved, no amount of mud or
mind-boggling gestalt could distract second-generation celebrants from
the cultural commodity that brought them together. Over the past 25
years, however, that commodity has become almost incomprehensibly more
huge and various. Partly as a result of forces unleashed or catalyzed
or just plain symbolized by Woodstock I, the range of available music
had increased tenfold.

Newsday's Ira Robbins rightly pointed out that the bill was
"solidly second-drawer. No Springsteen, no Pearl Jam, no Dead, no
R.E.M., no U2, no Led Zeppelin reunion." To which one might add, no
Guns 'N Roses or Dr. Dre, no Elton John or Rolling Stones, no Madonna
or Michael or Janet. Although the general suspicion of Woodstock II
contributed to this shortfall, economics made it inevitable--most of
the above-named are stadium draws capable of selling 50,000 seats in a
single city, well beyond the reach of promoters hoping to attract a
mere 250,000 customers to two and then three full days of music. In
1969, there was no such thing as a stadium draw, and the only acts
with the undeniable commercial-artistic cachet of the above-named were
Dylan-Beatles-Stones, none of whom played Woodstock. And though in
retrospect the Who and Jimi and Janis and Sly put Aerosmith and
Metallica and Peter Gabriel to shame, through 1969 they had two number
one LPs among them, and their lifetime total was four. The long list
of folkies at Woodstock I says a great deal about the provenance of
American "rock" in the hippie era, and also suggests why Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young proved the festival's real commercial
powerhouse. And the total lack of lineup controversy says even more
about rock's focus back then. Nobody foresaw the future of Led
Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, and nobody was smart enough to complain that
the Velvets and the Stooges were already of far greater aesthetic and
historical moment than Mountain and Jefferson Airplane. What
alternatives were there? The MC5? The Mothers of Invention? Come
on. Maybe we were utopians, but we didn't think we could have
everything.

And then there's the most crucial difference of all. In 1969
the music was the locus of a culture that everyone believed was out
there whether they were part of it or not. Going for the music
meant going for the culture in a way it no longer can--the two were
inextricable. Looking back to render an analysis that would have
seemed pointless then, I realize I went for the culture. This
wasn't because I didn't care for the acts, although I sat out
Friday's rain-soaked folk bill in the commodious tent of some
generous acquaintances my girlfriend and I bumped into and spent
the weekend with. (Thanks again, Josh and Babette.) It was because
as an unmarried 27-year-old rock critic living in a $45-a-month
apartment five blocks from the Fillmore East, I had caught most of
them many times. As an overemployed 52-year-old rock critic with
a nine-year-old and a coop to run, I'm lucky to get out three times
a month, and when I do I have alternatives galore. As a result, I
hadn't seen a single one of the 22 acts announced as of mid July
since the Nevilles played the Bottom Line long about 1987. For me,
music is a job that's inextricable from my life. So those "two more
days of peace and music"--hell, even three--sounded like they might
be fun. And they were for damn sure, albeit not exactly in the ways
I'd pictured. No two ways about it--I had a great time. Guess
somebody was doing their job.

Ten days earlier, however, all qualms in re lineup, companionship, and
totalitarianism were operative, and I had conceived a remedy:
Lollapalooza IV. Alternathink plaints about Perry Farrell's ripoff
only convinced me I'd love the thing, and in 1994 the bands were L7,
George Clinton, the Beastie Boys, the Breeders, A Tribe Called Quest,
and Smashing Pumpkins--plus, oh well, the Boredoms and Nick Cave, but
six out of eight is smoking. I was beguiled too by tales of the second
stage, political tables, and interactive gewgaws. We journalists call
this kind of thing a setup. It would be sheer joy to shake my fun in
Michael Lang's face when his ill-laid plans went thataway. I hoped
there'd be a press area to hear music from, but if not, me and Carola
and Nina and our friend Marc would simply bask further back, exploring
the sideshows when Nina got bored and repairing to the misting tent to
cool off.

This fantasy proved seriously palmy. Maybe the August 3 Lollapalooza
at Quonset State Airport in Rhode Island was merely the victim of the
four-car accident that closed Route 4 and turned an hour-and-a-half
trip from Boston into a four-hour crawl that cost L7 their slot and
effectively reduced the number of bands we caught to four even though
we saved 45 minutes on back roads. But I think it went deeper than
that. In fact, I'm ready to wonder how much effective fellow feeling a
postutopian aesthetic can generate. Thank God last-minute child care
reduced our party to three--at best Nina would have been the only
preteen on the premises, and at worst she might have gotten hurt.

Certainly three of the sets were fine. The Breeders' rough-hewn
diffidence, too raggedy a year ago, has evolved into sweet mastery of
noise-tune tension, edging out toward chaos then bringing it all back
home; it took just four or five brief songs for Marc, a 42-year-old
whose appetites tend toward the blues-based and lately the African, to
get inside the aesthetic. Although Clinton wasted precious minutes on
a lousy white female rapper, a mediocre black female soul singer, and
a lecture about drugs and the CIA, most of the P-Funk All-Stars' music
was classic in the best sense--together and comfortable at its most
galvanizing and up-for-the-downstroke. And the Beasties proved
themselves headliners who preferred leaving early to topping the
bill. But in any mass setting quality per se is never enough. You have
to be able to hear it. And you have to enjoy the company.

Having left our car near the gate for a quick exit, we had plenty of
chance to look the crowd over as we hoofed across a thickly weeded
cement-and-asphalt parking lot. It was 3:30 at a concert announced for
two, yet there was tailgating everywhere as kids downed their verboten
beers. About half looked nonstraight--hair colored or braided or long
or shaved or coyly unkempt, funny boots, a very few male skirts or
kilts, loads of alternaband T-shirts. Between sob stories at the comp
window and contraband iced tea at the frisk point, it was four before
we were inside, barely in time to get bored with the Verve's
second-stage feedback and discover that that dim throb over there was
Quest finishing its set. After the rappers had baptized the moshers up
front, the audience trod past and over our poncho. We moved up, then
found ourselves packed tight for the Breeders half an hour later. They
were wonderful, as I said. But sometimes the music was obscured by
more immediate sensory stimuli.

At 60 or 75 yards from the stage we were close enough to get a good
look at moshing that was willfully rough and intense for such a gentle
band, and occasionally a floater would pass by. Since my body is
breakable and Carola's more so, I elbowed the guy who crashed next to
me for future reference, although I felt more kindly toward the girls,
who were not just smaller but braver, more vulnerable--giving up their
physical safety to the group, which is the theory, rather than
menacing wimp standees, which was too often the male fact. Then,
during a lovely "Driving on Nine," a pit opened up right in front of
us, threatening a perimeter the moshers would have been happy to
enlarge even if a few small young things went home with
abrasions. Between eight and a dozen muscular boys, every one taller
or broader than me and most both, crossed play-fighting with turf
war--no fists, but plenty of hard shoves, with the requisite grins
frequently forced or absent, a mark of cool rather than
camaraderie. Most of them looked like frat assholes feeling their
hormones, the same thing that makes dance night fight night from El
Paso to Liverpool. Earlier I'd been bemused by the pit-etiquette
advisories in the Beasties' free newspaper. Now I understood.

If only because the crowd never closed up, things were better for
George, and if half of those who stayed barely paid attention, much
less danced or knew the hand signals, at least they could spy L7
boogieing on the scaffold. As the 25-minute intermission ended, Marc
took his camera forward for the Beasties, then quickly returned--it
was too crazy up there. The set began fast and strong with "Sure
Shot," and almost immediately two pits combusted spontaneously within
five yards of us as everyone else pogoed. We were having too much fun
to retreat. But around the end of the second song that choice was
denied us as several scared-looking girls led a stampede, which we
joined instantly with the help of a a tall, intrepid black kid--one of
two dozen I saw all day--scooping up our stuff. I shoved a few times,
stumbled a few times, caught Carola once or twice; when it was over a
minute later, my notes were gone and our distance from the stage had
almost doubled. Musically, this made a tremendous difference--the
difference between inhabiting the music and observing it. The
excitement was secondhand now, and although the blanket-tossing that
started up front eventually reached our depth, where we were the music
was the occasion rather than the inspiration for this far friendlier
physical rite.

It was after 8, so we spread our stash of Armenian food on a desolate
press table slightly aft of the stage, but although we hoped to avoid
Nick Cave, all too soon rampant self-expression was drowning out
dinner conversation. We took our time returning, then lounged far back
as the decent conventional rock and unriveting arena solos waxed and
mostly waned. Occasionally the star would announce that he was about
to knock our socks off, but he never came close, and around 9:20 he
started complaining in a strangely un-Australian accent. He dissed
Rhode Island, he dissed the site, he told us we should "tear up the
empty lot" when the show was over, he congratulated us sarcastically
for attending: "There may be a bomb underneath you but you are
rocking--at least you can tell your children that you came and you
rocked." He pouted: "I'm sorry we suck." He rationalized: "We
apologize for trapping ourselves in a vortex we can't get out of."
Finally, just before 10, he advised us to drive safely and limped off
to widely scattered cheers. The Quonset edition of Lollapalooza was
over.

I was pissed off and deeply confused. For half an hour I'd been
jeering this bad expressionist band in the expectation that soon I'd
hear a good one, Smashing Pumpkins. God, I thought, that must have
been some traffic jam. But when Carola asked who the female musician
was, I figured it out. Nick Cave had preceded Quest--that was
Smashing Pumpkins. How embarrassing for me--but how much more
embarrassing for Billy Corgan. Carola, who isn't normally given to
hyperbole, called it the worst performance she'd ever witnessed in her
life. I told her she'd never seen Richie Havens.

Lollapalooza was no disaster, but as an event it was nothing. The
security was irritating and so was the sound system. Most of the food
concessions sold greasy street-fair schlock. The overtaxed sideshows
closed early and the second-stage schedule was impossible to
figure. We never found the misting tent. Racially, Quest and Clinton
didn't make a dent. Generationally, the festival was not only
uniformly young, but almost uniformly 18-to-25, a subset of young. And
culturally it seemed fucked up--dumbass collegians seizing the symbols
of the alienated contemporaries who made the scene possible in much
the way carpers claim.

Also, the stampede spooked my wife, who'd been considering a date in
Saugerties, and now decided I should reconnoiter first. I used to
regard moshing as postutopian sublimation and complex metaphor, and I
still do, but one facet of that metaphor now dominates--whilst
responding poetically to these parlous times, it posits the rigidest
version of rock and roll physicality extant. What makes rock and roll
an intrinsic youth music is above all the raw energy it demands, and
moshers mean to drive off anyone who for reasons of age or gender or
size or temperament can't take that energy to the limit--a limit they
define. This is significant not just because a new breed of mosher
became one of Woodstock's media symbols, but because both Woodstocks
were bound up in the physical demands they imposed on
participants. Although these had nothing to do with the mosher ideal,
I had trouble convincing Carola that smashing pumpkinheads wouldn't be
a threat in Saugerties, and maybe she knew more than I did. Who would
have thunk anyone would slam-dance to the Allman Brothers?

So we dealt with the demands we could foresee. I packed changes of
clothes, a jacket, shorts, two hero sandwiches, two bottles of
seltzer, fruit, trail mix, crackers, peanut butter and jelly, a loaf
of bread, sunblock, insect repellent, a poncho, a flashlight, and
(bingo) an umbrella. I purchased maps of Ulster and Greene
counties. And though I'd found friends to put me up after learning the
Kingston Holiday Inn wanted $340 a night, on general principles I
bought a sleeping bag. Prevented by snafu from driving to the site, I
found a use for my map when the shuttle driver got lost on the way
from the hotel lot, but the congestion proved bearable--a 15-minute
tie-up near Saugerties followed by two miles of stop-and-go. My first
impression was tents everywhere--fields, hills, woods, roadsides. Some
of them had stakes. John Hughes of the Fort Lauderdale
Sun-Sentinel, an easygoing Nevilles and Allmans fan who reads
me in Playboy, had suggested I stow my stuff with him in case I
needed to share his two-person tent. So at 3:45 we disembarked at the
nexus behind the main stage, checked out the giant press tent, and
found high ground in a press camping area. And soon the avantish hip
hop I couldn't believe I was half hearing drew me away.

The North Field was full but negotiable. As I shuffled past the main
concession bank and picked my way laboriously to a more distant spot
than I'd ever settled for at Lollapalooza, I determined that this was
indeed one of my favorite live bands, Philadelphia's Goats, who
finished their abrasive rock-rap to polite applause augmented by my
yells. Kindly crew members hosed down a knot of moshers up
front. There was a burst of deja vu as a fat, balding, clownish Wavy
Gravy warned of strychnine in the white, blue, and dark green acid,
pronounced the Felix the Cat and Skeleton brands "shitty," and
couldn't believe what he was reading about the brown tabs with black
spots: "It's . . . good? Hey, it's good!" Then came the first of many
entreaties to those camped on the North Field proper, which was
intended as listening space, capped by Wavy's John Lennon rewrite:
"All we are saying/Is please move your tents."

Since the never-ending Blues Traveler was up and I needed to get
oriented, I made my way back, passing through the gate with the
laminate that was the mark of privilege in this community. At
Woodstock I, where the press tent turned into a hospital, my only
privileges were a lucky limo ride in with Peter Townshend and the
providence of my ad hoc hosts. Here my laminate meant a little
something--free Pepsi products and Saratoga water in the press tent,
queueless phones that worked occasionally, camping close to the stage,
relatively undisgusting latrines, two useful service roads--and no
matter how much these advantages unbalanced my participant-observer
tightrope walk, I would have been stupid (and a very atypical
participant) to turn them down. I called Carola, whose knees are
trickier than mine, to tell her that our jitney-and-child care
contingency plans would be ill-advised even if I could get back to the
car, which seemed dubious. This was what sleeping bags were for.

An hour later I returned to a North Field that was reaching critical
mass. Still learning the terrain, I was funneled onto the
vehicle-clogged road between the main concessions and Ecology Village,
ending up well past the camping line. Hopscotching over jammed tents
and pushing slowly through impassable walkways, I emcountered numerous
children, plenty of mid-teens, and an enormous number of over-25s,
with alternakids much sparser than at Lollapalooza. Even the college
types lacked that balls-out spring-break arrogance; however much
role-playing it did for the cameras, this was not a notably rowdy
crowd. After 20 minutes I claimed a one-man patch of grass at the edge
of a crosswise aisle, where for four hours I listened to Del Amitri,
Live, James, King's X, and Sheryl Crow. The only one I might have
sampled in New York was Crow, whose singer-with-backup wilted in the
space, but only Del Amitri, a meaningless pop-metal outfit who were
one of five PolyGram-associated acts on Friday's supposedly
"cutting-edge" bill, enjoys zero word of mouth. As it turned out,
James alone showed me something. But just finding out whether any
songs stuck was a trip: I was touched by the way some onlooker or
other always seemed ready to don this mediocre stuff like a press-on
tattoo, humming Del Amitri's hit or strumming air acoustic to Crow or
explaining a James lyric to an older sister-in-law up from New Mexico
because her Utica-born husband had gone to Bethel when he was 15.

The Friday show was mostly a con. Added when ticket sales seemed
ominously slow, its concept was the pseudoalternative niche now
favored for breaking acts, a subdivision of the little-of-this,
little-of-that strategy that defined Woodstock's programming as it
does all current megabiz marketing. At the first Woodstock, the more
naive pilgrims assumed a fundamentally homogeneous music that was the
locus of a culture--a culture they were eager to share with or even
absorb from their hipper, slightly older fellows (so unlike the
dumbasses of Lollapalooza, who were intent on transforming its culture
into their own). The run of celebrants at Woodstock II expected
nothing more than bands they knew, or knew about, which in 1994
includes both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Nine Inch Nails, a bizarre
Saturday-night segue that didn't produce anything like the exodus wags
predicted. This-and-that was fine with these folks, who could
calculate that the much-maligned $135 ticket boiled down to $3.50 a
band even if there was no way you could see them all. Revolving
stages kept boring intermissions to a minimum--I twice clocked the
turnaround at under three minutes, about as long as it takes the Dead
to start the next song. And the sound system beat Woodstock I's (and
Lollapalooza's) all to shit--loud and clear at a quarter mile, with
giant video screens for visuals, not the way I like to listen but a
legitimate aesthetic mode nevertheless.

Still, halfway through Crow I'd had enough. I needed to talk to my
wife and shoot the shit with my pals in the press tent, and Collective
Soul wasn't going to stop me. It was midnight before I rejoined a much
looser crowd for the dregs of Candlebox, the last band on my
handout. Then, back through the gate, I heard a familiar
clatter. Damn! That was "Blister in the Sun," by the announced but
presumed-canceled Violent Femmes. I ran back and listened joyously to
a long, animated set, often pausing to admire a vivacious teenager who
was far from the only one dancing and mouthing the words. This was the
first band with a serious following all day, and also the first with a
signature sound. The difference was heaven. Give Gordon Gano
credit--maybe he deserves a cult as much as Jonathan Richman. The
Femmes played the most exciting music I heard all weekend. I've yet to
meet another press person who caught it.

I'd been sleeping badly on the ground outside for two hours when some
combination of a passing vehicle and the putatively ambient Aphex Twin
woke me up. This was Ravestock, John Scher's message that sleep was
for wusses, and when the volume rose I gave up and embarked on a
futile search for the South Stage. Raindrops sent me racing back to
the tent, where John Hughes helped me pull in my stuff. Adrenaline
coursing, I grabbed my umbrella and set off down the slick entrance
road, where I was refused access at the backstage gate before
clambering over a pipe railing and through a breach in a cyclone
fence. Onstage, two DJs were mixing loud and tribal and pretty damn
good for an audience in the high hundreds, few of whom pretended to
dance. Back at the fence, gleeful kids with bedrolls snuck in like
ballplayers at a locked schoolyard. It was dawn.

PBJ for breakfast, and at the 9:30 press conference, announcements of
portajohn progress, tent struggles, overtaxed parking lots,
roadblocks, an unbroken perimeter (sure), and 200,000-plus customers,
most of whom seemed to be out taking the air. The foot traffic was so
dense I could hardly move, and suddenly my misty memories of Woodstock
I cleared: never, never had the bodies been this packed. It
took 35 minutes to negotiate the half-mile route to the South Stage;
the swath of grass leading down from the Craft Village concession (and
camping) area was already the scene of a mud-climbing exhibition. But
the South Field itself was idyllic--I was closer than at Lollapalooza,
with room to lie down. Regrets to Joe Cocker, scheduled for noon in
the main arena--I wanted to guard my spot for the Cranberries. A
bland, overpriced curried lentil pita from a local vendor convinced me
to stick to the knockwurst-sized $2.50 hot dogs and 24-ounce $2 Pepsis
of the Fine Host oppressors. At 12:30 sharp, the new-age Irish
folk-rockers began a set so tuneful and weird I never thought of
leaving. That was my m.o.--to listen till I didn't want to listen,
just like a real person. PolyGram's Italian rocker Zucchero assured
that at 2:30 I would have no trouble reclaiming my turf for a
disappointingly excellent Youssou N'Dour, who without his male dancers
and singers didn't live up to the hype I'd been feeding anyone who
would listen, who wouldn't have drawn like the Cranberries if he did,
and who cost me Cypress Hill.

By then a bifurcation was emerging--two festivals, almost. Over in
the North Field were the stars and their stalwarts, content to do the
funky sardine or stand 600 yards from the stage in a dead flat space
far less ideal than Max Yasgur's rolling amphitheater. In contrast,
the much smaller but never jammed South Field attracted open-minded
hedonists, whose distaste for suffering often earned them better
music. And of course there was migration back and forth. With the
Band's comeback not even a throwback and their South Field show
penciled in at two and a half hours, I set out for Henry Rollins via
the press tent. And though there'd been sprinkles the whole gray day,
that's when the real rain began--a gusty downpour that ran off the
canvas roof in thick rivulets for most of an hour. In the hostile
element immersed, Rollins howled and flexed through the storm like an
Outward Bound poster boy--or so it appeared on the closed-circuit
feed. When the rain slackened to umbrella strength, I opted for the
Band after all. Avoiding the new mud on a sideline, I couldn't tell
when the guest was Bob Weir and when Roger McGuinn, but everyone was
sharp and loose. Eventually, however, the group's once bracing
repertoire of grand old blues and personal bests seemed too
predictable. On the North Field, Melissa Etheridge was into her
climactic Janis Joplin routine, which to my considerable surprise she
had down. Two over-30 babes with wedding rings shimmied and grokked. I
wondered whether they knew Melissa was gay. I wondered again when they
both started groping a 24-year-old male law student.

This Woodstock inspired volumes of dumb reporting about sex and drugs
and rock and roll, always a danger when you send a generalist out to
do a rock critic's job or Kennedy out to do anything. I never got
close to the pits, where I'm sure clothes were often extraneous, and I
don't doubt the existence of the three naked cuties who posed for 5000
snapshots. But in 48 hours I observed half a dozen nude men and
precisely one nude woman--a lush blond who wasn't actually nude, but
wearing an open shirt, as was her well-muscled and nicely hung male
companion, a very sexy image. Although I'd be sad to learn there was
no fucking going on, orgiastic it wasn't. The promised searches were
perfunctory, mostly verbal, but the scare worked. Muddy Evian bottles
outnumbered muddy liquor bottles, beer was as much beverage as
inebriant, and though there was considerable cannabis around, it was
far from pervasive and never freely shared. Where at Woodstock I it
took effort not to get stoned, here that was one option among
many. Yet loose behavior remained an ideal, and my gropers had it
going on. I laughed on the outside and cried on the inside when Crosby
(your crazy uncle just before he burps), Stills (aging surf shop owner
who likes his talent stupid), & Nash (seedy public schoolmaster
well into his cups) greeted them with "Love the One You're With."
Soon, however . . . well, you know. Morbid curiosity loses its charm.
Craving normality, I made for the South Stage and Primus. The band
every kid I'd chatted up had the hots for was Nine Inch Nails, and by
8:30 the North Field had long surpassed critical mass. Supposedly due
to a sound glitch (I bet they were in a snit or applying their
makeup), they came on half an hour late, the longest such delay all
weekend, but they sure knew how to make an entrance--plastered with
the mud that was already Woodstock's universal currency. "You
miserable muddy fuckers," spat Trent Reznor, launching what should
have been a set of unparalleled cacophony and aggression. Only it
wasn't--half of it was dirges that gave me no reason to fight off the
throng. At 30 minutes I'd listened till I didn't want to listen. Other
refugees bitched bitterly when they were turned back at the laminate
gate, almost breaking through--the only anger I encountered away from
the stage and the press tent all weekend. Finally feeling sleep
deprivation, I failed to get to the South Field until Salt-n-Pepa were
over. John was flat out atop his down bag, and soon I was drifting off
to the dulcet strains of Metallica, a band I don't get who sounded
like the Kronos Quartet under the circumstances. At 1:30 I woke to a
downpour on the rain shield of our efficient little tent and fell
asleep to a rowdy Aerosmith I regretted missing. And at 3:30 I woke to
World War III.

I thought it was gunshots and stayed down; John thought it was an
exploding transformer and burst outside. In fact it was the 10-minute
fireworks display the rowdies had capped their show with--there'd be
no apocalypses now. Blessed sleep had drained from my body, though,
and when the adrenaline didn't subside by 5, I went out. Deserters
who'd penetrated the laminate barrier waited for shuttles they could
only hope would come. A medical guy I helped phone his parents from
the thickly littered press tent claimed countless breaks and sprains
in the treacherous slampits and four ODs nobody else reported. The
rain had added a slippery cushion to the firmest surfaces, and past
the gate the mud was much deeper. Nonsleepers and new arrivals
lurched around with arms outstretched, the ubiquitous Pepsi cups their
best footing. I've been phobic about mud ever since losing a shoe at a
construction site as a seven-year-old, and between my wits and my
laminate I was good at avoiding it, but it has a great advantage--it's
drier than water, so even when you go over your shoetops you don't get
soaked. And so I wandered down into the mostly empty area by the now
enormous North Stage pit. Beer drinkers grossed each other out with
piss tales. Two Canucks hit on a two-gal-one-guy posse just in from
Poughkeepsie. A black suburban teenager in a lounge chair gave her
white boyfriend a 1000-watt smile.

By now even Scher had abandoned the fable that free entries were
negligible--if 300,000 attended, and it was probably more, at least a
third didn't pay. Ticket-checking had been inefficient from the git,
and by Saturday afternoon there was no need to crash the gate because
you could walk through. Even when I came back at 9:30, few of those
positioned up front wore the wristbands that signified official entry,
and quite a few talked about driving close and hitchhiking in after
midnight. This new blood kept the energy high, but also increased the
spring-break quotient; for some, it seemed, this was no longer
"Woodstock," just a free concert--a little of this, a little of
that. CeCe Peniston's pop-gospel supergroup Sisters of Glory followed
fast upon an equally glorious surprise visit from Bethel's own Country
Joe McDonald, who worked up vigorous sing-along action on
"Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" and gracefully retired. Thelma,
Mavis, et al. commanded the weekend's strongest voices this side of
Youssou, and I enjoyed their Sunday standards until yet another
downpour drove through my umbrella-poncho combo. Back in the press
tent, we were told the rain would continue all day--and that
departures were overwhelming the shuttle system.

Actually, the rain would soon let up, then hold off till late, but the
real person in me was worried. Nina had burst into tears when she
heard my voice on the phone, and I didn't want to drive the thruway at
3 a.m. on coffee and good intentions. I estimated the likelihood of
transcendent Dylan at one-in-five, could just barely stand to miss
Porno for Pyros and the Chili Peppers, and had never figured to stay
for designated closer, Peter Gabriel. So when a four o'clock ride to
Kingston was proffered, I decided I'd probably take it, and in the end
I did. But before that, Woodstock would change, as it kept
doing. Nearly three hours of Gabriel-approved WOMAD Afrofolk-pop wore
out Green Day fans on the South Field, and their mood wasn't improved
by Hassan Hakmoun's intense guitar weave or Wavy's grave assertion
that these were "some of the best musicians in the world" when they
weren't even some of the best musicians in Uganda. I spent half of
this time standing on a tent-chocked hillock in the North Field
listening to the Allman Brothers, who were both a revelation--Warren
Haynes an ace Duane substitute, Dickey Betts an ace Garcia fan,
"Ramblin' Man" as hooky as "Blister in the Sun," whole band as classic
as P-Funk--and utterly familiar, then tranced out against a fence to
Hakmoun. My watch said 2:39. At 2:41 the stage turned and Green Day's
Billy Joe shouted, "How you doin', all you rich motherfuckers?"

The Berkeley wise guys' Dookie is so secondhand I'd never
pinned it down, and I couldn't name a song on it, but the hooks had
stuck. Those fast chords were a jolt of adrenaline I wanted--somehow
punk strategy, conceived as a corrective to fuzzy Woodstock Nation
vibes almost two decades ago, still sounded fresh, while the Allmans'
hardly older boogie seemed timeless. Spurred on by Billy Joe--"We
suggest that you throw mud, that's fine"--the pent-up kids were soon
pelting their speedy antiheroes with handfuls of mud and clods of wet
turf. The whole scene was exhilarating and hilarious, pure punk
venting--blue-haired bassist Mike Dimt caught a clod and stuffed it in
his mouth, stage-divers scampered around worried, then angry
guards. But quickly it went out of control, and before Billy Joe had
egged the crowd into demanding they walk off, drummer Tré Cool had
lost two teeth. "Let's hear it for the earth which we're moving around
so magnificently," Wavy requested pathetically. "Play hard, play
fair, nobody gets hurt. These are the good old days. Thank you for
sharing mud with me."

An hour and a half later, having decided that the Spin Doctors were a
studio band and failed to cash in $22 worth of scrip, I was hiking the
two miles to the VIP lot. When I called home from Kingston to say I'd
be back by 8, Nina burst into tears again. She'd wanted to go see
The Mask.

There were 300,000 stories in the not actually naked city, and mine is
but one of them. It would be easier to write the definitive account
of, say, Des Moines, which has the virtue of staying in one place for
longer than an eyeblink. I never got to the Surreal Field or the
far-side campground or the pizza whose poetry-bedecked boxes doubled
so nicely as disposable seating. Beddy-bye bound, my colleagues missed
my fave set of the weekend; homeward bound, I missed Dylan and the
Chili Peppers, either of whom, by all reports, might (and might not)
have changed the festival yet again. But in my Woodstock, even the
finest Woodstock I rock, by the Allmans and the Band, seemed
ultimately unmomentous, a little of this leading only to a little of
that, while new music carrying a deeper charge, like Green Day or Nine
Inch Nails, threatened the post/imitation/wannabe-utopian vibe. So did
alternarock's gift to Woodstock II's counterculture, the mud people
the cameras made so much of, who by late Saturday were tending toward
the position that anybody within reach deserved the immersion these
moshers were certain alone defined their Woodstock experience.

Straight out of Woodstock-the-movie, the mud idea emerged from
the pits as textbook Woodstock-spectacle, and judging by the wide
berth they got, the mud people never understood what it ended up
meaning to most of us. By us I don't mean my interest groups--the
laminated, most of whom were unduly appalled by the weekend's
discomforts, or the many over-30s the laminated ignored, who totaled
perhaps five per cent of the attendees concentrated on the two fields'
fringes. I mean the big us--everyone who had the unduplicable and
pretty much indescribable experience of getting up in the morning
crowded into a specially designed, surreally overpopulated outdoor
space with the same music lovers who'd been there the night before,
and who then shared the limited, manageable challenge of overcoming
adversities that defeated enough celebrants to make the whole thing
seem like real life.

Which it wasn't, of course. More or less as PolyGram intended,
Woodstock ended up an incalculably complex and profitable
entertainment experience. "I suspect that if there were 200,000
40-to-50-year-olds you wouldn't have such a mellow atmosphere," Scher
boasted Saturday morning, and this meaningless hypothetical had its
truth value. If only because they didn't want to ruin the movie, the
young celebrants were nice to each other, keeping a lid on their
aggressions however free they were with their joints, and they'll no
doubt construct their own myths around an incontrovertibly wondrous
event. But it's hard to imagine those myths unleashing or catalyzing
or symbolizing any social forces; in fact, it's hard to imagine them
competing historically with the fucked-up antiutopian struggle that is
Lollapalooza, where much of the most momentous music at Woodstock II
first came to prominence. These celebrants didn't believe the
commodity that brought them together was the locus of a culture--at
best they may have thought it was the province of a
generation. Although the minuscule proportion of blacks (a guesstimate
two-tenths of one per cent, up after the front door was opened) was
probably a tiny improvement over both Woodstock I and Lollapalooza,
most of the celebrants were just as glad the artist lineup represented
little if any progress in the battle against racism the first
Woodstock generation supposedly cared so much about, and although
their range of female role models had broadened visibly since 1969, I
wonder how many reflected that not one of the few women who played
Saugerties had the stature of Janis Joplin or Joan Baez or the
potential of the Breeders or L7. Fun was underrated in the '60s, which
favored putatively permanent modes of transcendence. In the '90s,
people I wish knew better are all too ready to settle for it.

Somehow the foursomes of fellow deserters at the thruway rest area
looked wrong to me. Hey--they were clean! Most seemed to have rinsed
their bare legs somewhere; even their shoes had the outer crusts
knocked off. Me, I wore my mud like a badge all the way to the East
Village. Carola and Nina were impressed. But my weekend was over. When
I strode home from alternate-siding the car with my laminate swinging
and my lower extremities still showing that good clean country dirt,
not a soul looked twice.